In memoriam Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr, Professor Emeritus of the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, who died on 3 February 2005 in Bedford, Massachusetts, at the age of 100+, was one of the major evolutionary scholars of our time. Mayr’s life was devoted to understanding the biodiversity of life and its dramatic adaptive evolution. His impact on evolutionary biology was profound and long lasting. He is widely considered the foremost evolutionary biologist, or the Darwin of the 20th century, and the last living architect of the new modern ‘‘evolutionary synthesis’’. The latter was established during the 1930–1950s and reviewed in his book, edited with William Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis (1980). The book highlights the evolution of biodiversity by natural selection, operating on genetic diversity within populations in diverse taxa across life. The ‘‘Synthesis’’ is the great integration of Darwinism, Mendelism, and population genetics elevating evolution towards a concerted interdisciplinary biological worldview. Over a remarkably productive career Mayr made substantial contributions in many different disciplines including orthinology, taxonomy, zoogeography, systematics, evolutionary biology, history, and the philosophy of science. He published 700 journal articles and 25 books. Mayr received numerous major awards including the Balzan Prize in 1983, the International Prize for Biology in 1994, and the Crafoord Prize in 1999. He was also one of the founders of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1946 and served as the first editor of the journal Evolution. He founded the Journal of the History of Biology in 1967. Mayr cemented the history of ideas as a major driving force for science with his groundbreaking book, ‘‘Systematics and the Origin of Species’’ (1942), a key book in the evolutionary synthesis of the 20th century, written at age 38; his ‘‘Principles of Systematic Zoology’’ consolidated taxonomy as a science based on biological variation within and between species in nature. Other evolutionary milestones focusing on the species problem in nature, and based on vast data sources from systematics, genetics, and biogeography are ‘‘Animal Species and Evolution’’, written in 1963. His ‘‘Evolution and the Diversity of Life’’ in 1976